We believe meaningful progress in health equity is built deliberately. It happens through systems designed around real lives and leaders who understand that justice must move from principle to practice. That belief shapes our work and why we choose to highlight leaders whose approach reflects it in action.
Ruth Pollard is one of those leaders.
Across public health, hospital systems, and community-based care, Ruth’s career has been guided by a clear conviction: access, dignity, and outcomes are inseparable from the systems that deliver care. Her leadership demonstrates how strategy, operations, and community voice can work together to advance equity in ways that are practical, durable, and rooted in lived
experience.
As President and CEO of the DC Primary Care Association (DCPCA), Ruth leads efforts to strengthen community health centers across Washington, DC. These centers serve as essential anchors in neighborhoods across all eight Wards. They sit at the intersection of healthcare and daily reality, where success depends on whether systems reflect how people actually live. For Ruth, community-centered healthcare is where justice becomes practice, where systems are built around work schedules, transportation, childcare demands, language, culture, and trust.
That perspective was shaped early. Growing up with a family spread across the District and Prince George’s County, Ruth saw how zip codes could produce entirely different realities. The inequities she witnessed were not accidental, but the predictable outcomes of systems not designed with all communities in mind.
Rather than pursuing a clinical role, Ruth focused her career on the administrative and operational side of healthcare. There, policy, infrastructure, and resources could be aligned at scale. This work became her lever for change. Aligning finance, governance, data, and strategy was not about efficiency alone. It was about enabling frontline teams to deliver care that is dependable, dignified, and grounded in community wisdom.
Ruth’s leadership spans roles at the DC Department of Health, Children’s National Hospital, and Providence Hospital, where she served as Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. Across these environments, she developed a reputation for translating complex policy and operational priorities into strategies that remained accountable to the communities they were meant to serve. In her work, mission only matters if systems are strong enough to carry it.
Today, she also serves as Executive Director of the DC Connected Care Network, a clinically integrated system connecting more than 45 health center locations across the District. Here, coordination is not merely technical. It is an equity strategy. When care is connected and operations reduce friction rather than create it, people experience dignity instead of delay.
Strong systems, in this sense, are not separate from equity. They are one of its clearest
expressions.
This approach closely aligns with JBRF’s own philosophy and lived focus. For Black women living in Wards 7 and 8, health is shaped not only by access to care, but by the strength of the surrounding ecosystem: workforce pathways, stable employment, coordinated systems, and institutions that reflect community realities. During JBRF’s strategic design initiative, Ruth was an important partner and voice, helping us better understand where gaps persist and where opportunity exists, particularly across health-related career pathways. Her insights reinforced the need to think beyond individual programs and toward systems that can support both wellbeing and long-term economic mobility.
Her commitment to equity also extends to leadership development. Through her teaching at Georgetown University’s School of Health and her service on the Capella University School of Nursing and Health Sciences Advisory Board, Ruth invests in future leaders with the same intentionality she brings to systems change. Leadership, in her view, must be both compassionate and accountable. It should be earned, but supported, demanding, but humane.
Progress in health equity rarely announces itself loudly. More often, it appears in quieter shifts.
Fewer missed appointments. Improved chronic disease management. Expanded behavioral health access. Health centers hiring from the communities they serve. These moments accumulate, strengthening the fabric of neighborhoods and making future progress possible. Hope, Ruth believes, lives in people, in their resilience and their insistence on care that honors
their humanity.
Beyond her professional roles, Ruth’s leadership is demonstrated through her commitment to empowering communities. Alongside her husband, Gary Pollard, Jr., she invests in philanthropy and entrepreneurship that expand opportunity and support long-term economic stability. Family, access, and opportunity remain guiding forces in her work and her vision for more equitable
systems.
At JBRF, we share stories like Ruth’s to illuminate what aligned, community-centered leadership looks like in practice. Her work reflects the values we champion: systems built around real lives,
equity embedded into operations, and leadership that listens before it acts.
By lifting up leaders who embody these principles, we reaffirm our belief that meaningful change
is built collectively and that the future of health equity depends on people willing to do the patient, systems-level work communities deserve.